Masters Star Scott Hartley Finds Balance is Best for Fast Times

An unusual strength training routine keeps him running

Scott Hartley's results in M45 masters track competition are impressive enough by themselves. Hartley won the 800m and mile at the USATF Masters Indoor Championships last March, running 2:00.43 and 4:31.50, respectively, times that would also have won the M40 division. In April he picked up another win at the storied Drake Relays in Des Moines, Iowa. In June, Hartley posted a 1:58.81/4:13.01 800m/1500m double in an open meet in Fort Collins, Colo., not far from his home in Nunn. And in July he repeated his 800m/1500m at the USATF Masters Outdoor Championships, running 1:58.41 and 4:07.47 – again the fastest times over 40.

More impressive, however, is that Hartley had given up on running long before he reached 40, due to recurring injuries. It was only in 2008 that he discovered masters track even existed, when he happened on "two old guys throwing a hammer" at a track in Fort Collins.

When Hartley was a freshman at the Colorado School of Mines, the administration required a Phys Ed course to keep first-year engineering students from gaining too much weight. The course Hartley found involved nothing more than running 2 miles ("Some guys," he remembers, "took the whole hour") and Hartley would hammer it out as fast as he could and head back to his room. At least, that was how he did it until the track coach spotted him and put him on a partial scholarship.

Hartley ran four years at Mines, part of Division II's hyper-competitive Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference, concentrating on the mile and half-mile, and his name is still in the record books there. He kept training after graduation, getting under 15:00 for 5K once. Then the injuries started.

"I would train for three or four months," Hartley recalls, "and start feeling like I was getting into good shape. Then I'd get hurt. I would pull a quad or my back would start to ache, and it would take months to heal. I'd only get to a certain level before I'd have to stop. I'm pretty stubborn, and I'm sure I did that several times before I gave up."

Hartley's road back started years later, when he was talking with Conrad Shaefer, a co-worker at the Anheuser-Busch brewery in Fort Collins, about his injuries. At the time, Hartley recalls, "My lower back problems had reached the point that I couldn't ride in a car for long periods, because my legs would go numb. I'd seen doctors and physical therapists who told me I would just have to live with it, that there was degeneration in my lower back, and that was the way it was."

Shaefer's response was not one a runner would have expected. "Perhaps you should think about lifting your way out of this," he suggested.

Outside his job, Shaefer was a competitive athlete himself, a national-class water-skier. Looking for a way to get an edge and reduce injury in his sport, Shaefer started doing CrossFit, a strength and conditioning program that rejects specialization. Shaefer became certified as a trainer with CrossFit, and when he started with Hart ley he started with one of the basics: squats. Specifically, "air squats," with no bar.

"I couldn't do it," Hartley recalls. "I couldn't keep my weight on my heels." It took months of patient practice and stretching, as well as other strength work, before Hartley could do a proper squat. By then, he was convinced he'd found a way out of his injury cycle.

"I was way out of balance," he says. "I needed to build strength to balance the muscles I was working from running." Those imbalances, he believes, led to his recurring injuries.